Ask HN: How do you optimize your focus?
There is no better feeling than being _in the zone_ for me. I forget to eat, to drink, to communicate. But besides through a fragile symphony music and totally empty surroundings (at home) or a busy café (with headphones) it seems really hard to trigger this flow state. Sprinkle some existential dread on top (due to the current employment situation...), and it becomes nigh-impossible.
So, HN, what are your tricks and hacks to _limitlesslify_ yourself? I'm becoming desperate.
53 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 95.4 ms ] threadI guess it has to do with how quiet and serene that time you can become, which helps you jump straight in the zone without even realizing it.
Should we call it "the vortex of absorption", LOL?! :D
Seems like a lot of people where I live start their work from this hour; I presume they are either merchandisers that deliver milk to the nearest supermarkets or lorries that need to get delivered before the morning heavy traffic that schools cause on a daily basis.
I guess in my case, the combination of low lights at night, near complete silence all over the place, and hearing crickets outside the window during my coding hours, it helps immensely to get absorbed by the mystic call of zoning lol!
So for me. Working in the night at home works the best. Absolutely no WhatsApp or Instagram or Facebook ding-dong, no screaming outside, no loud sounds.. and then, it helps me even more, when o talk to myself when I do some critical thinking and debugging the whole night xD
My setup is to get a dumb phone, uninstall every unrelated applications on my laptop, install everyting related to the current personal project, test to make sure, and then stay in a cafe without wifi for a few hours.
It is probably a lot cheaper than staying in a motel as John Carmack did.
You get into the zone because you're obsessed with a problem or an idea. It's the key to being in the flow. Too many people try to optimize the environment, when it helps only a little.
Unfortunately, I only have a little clue how to trigger it. But I do know that what you're working on is the most important part. In addition to that journaling, reading, and meditation help. Other than that, it's okay to leave these things to chance and not try too hard.
Just like meditation. With meditation my experience was that the "trick" is realizing that meditation isn't a special state that you only go into sometimes, the goal (for want of a better word) is to be in a meditative (aware and undistracted) state all of the time. I think the same may be true of focus/deep work/flow, i.e. the ideal situation would be that you bring your regular state of being closer to the focused state rather than trying to figure out how to get into that special state some of the time.
Doesn't always work though.
Not the other way around.
Anything that avoids grinding away at the work, avoids flow.
Trying to be efficient. Trying to optimize. Trying to align the stars. These are not grinding away at the work.
You've been interrupted? So what. Nobody cares. Get back to grinding away at the work.
The only magic trick is grinding away at the work.
Good luck.
* listen to music with no vocals. For whatever reason, vocals distract me from thinking. I often use brain.fm or a "synthwave" set of songs on Spotify.
* write my ideas for architecture/code down on paper and check them off one-by-one. Then handwriting helps me.
Good luck!
Breaking down “evaluate framework choices, by making small prototypes” was one I had the other day. First pass was discouraging, because I discovered 3 new frameworks in the course of executing my plan.
Makes sense. But I guess what ultimately worked was rewriting my list once I was half-way into a flow. Once I could actually see all of the puzzle pieces, some switch flipped.
(legit ADHD diagnosis, not self medicated, speak with your PCP if able)
Exercise, therapy, eating well, etc doesn't work for everyone. I've been in therapy most of my life. I still needed ADHD medications to do be able to do normal tasks even when I was also riding my bike well over 200 miles per week and eating well.
the kindle scribe has been nice for this because i’m not tempted by other apps on the tablet as with my ipad, and i still have documentation readily available in ebook form.
Take care of your body and mind and the rest of life becomes a lot easier.
Frustratingly, productivity seems to be mostly downstream of good self-care: exercise, good sleep, avoiding caffeine, and good diet in my personal descending order of importance.
It sucks that they're interrelated, and one of those, good sleep, can be a biological dice roll, and that the other three are things I'm tempted to burn on the altar of extra productivity in the short-term when it just decreases it in the long-term. :p
The first task was game sound design, and the second one was game marketing. Both tasks seemed impenetrable because I had no experience with either. Yet I managed to create the entire soundscape and SFX for the game in about a month, and, with the second workload, broke into game marketing and started getting some positive response.
Here's how it worked: both impenetrable problems turned out to be breakable into small chunks that were 1) easy enough for a beginner, and 2) came with immediately pleasing rewards on an intermittent schedule. For example, a sound that plays in a previously silent game, or 20 upvotes on a Reddit marketing post are immediately rewarding, but you cannot predict that the next post will be lucky, or that you will find a perfect sound effect on Audiojungle.
Both workloads turned into hugely addictive dopamine loops -- marketing felt similar to Diablo or a slot machine, and looking for sounds on Audiojungle felt like browsing porn. Due to that addictiveness I was able to work for 12-14 hours per day.
The absence of distractions is also helpful: the flow state was at its best at night when my family was sleeping.
If I don't have enough real, important things to do on any given day, white noise begins to creep into my psyche and I end up shaving yaks.
So anecdotally load yourself up with even more stuff to do!
Meditation
Belief in a higher purpose
Yoga/exercise
Once you find yourself in a moment of struggle with staying focused, getting into the "right state", etc., do the following. Put everything aside, grab a pencil and a piece of paper, and go to some quiet place. Sit still and quiet for 10 minutes. Do absolutely nothing - produce minimum entropy. Then start writing down everything that starts coming down to your mind: any thoughts, worries, ideas, whatsoever. Keep writing until you feel like nothing else to add. Put a date and return to what you've been doing. You can throw the paper away or hide it somewhere, but most importantly forget about it.
Call it brain dumping or anything else. For me it doesn't mater how it works unless it works. I have my own adjustments to this technique, but generally it's the same. Sometimes I get very surprising insights and get simple answers for questions which seemed to be complicated. Sometimes it just helps to clear up my mind. Anyways, I hope you'll find it useful. Good luck!
Edited: typos
You have to know yourself to keep yourself capable of peak productivity.
2. Only work on things you're passionate about.